Camp Fire profile: Beverly Powers, ‘bubbly’ and ‘full of love’

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Beverly Craig Powers, right, was 64 when she perished in the Camp Fire in
November 2018. Above, she is seen at the wedding of a friend’s daughter,
along with her boyfriend Robert John DuVall, 76, who also perished in the
fire. (Photo courtesy Beverly Hanes-Simon/Wheeland Photography)

Beverly Powers, a nurse who most recently worked in long-term care facilities in Paradise, once dressed up as Nurse Ratched for Halloween.

And while she was responsible for handing out medication to her patients — and wore a white nurse’s gown that day — her similarity to the famously cold caregiver of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” stopped there.

“That’s the total opposite of Bev,” Mollie Macarthy-Openshaw, a friend and colleague, said of Powers said in a recent interview. “She’s a great nurse.”

Powers, who perished in the deadly Camp Fire in November at the age of 64, was always “witty and dingy and fun with me,” and “full of love,” she said.

“But she was really that way with her patients, too,” she added.

“She’d laugh with them and make them feel wonderful. She was just an amazing human. She just had the cutest little spirit.”

Raised in coastal Orange County, Powers was always a sweet person, said her San Clemente High School friend, Beverly Hanes-Simon.

“She was a cheerleader. Just a bubbly, cheerful, great girl,” Hanes-Simon said. The two classmates stayed in touch, saw each other every several years, and even helped plan a 40th high school reunion in 2012.

“I miss her terribly,” she said.

After a divorce from her first husband, Powers moved near Chico, where she had some family.

She lived in or near Paradise for the past almost 20 years, friends and family said, except for a few years when she moved back and forth between Florida with her second husband, whom she met at a bingo night in Magalia.

She continued nursing until just months before the fire and developed a relationship with Robert John DuVall, 76, another Paradise resident who also died in the fire. Powers had been caring for his mother in the long-term facility where she last worked.

Powers and DuVall attended the wedding of Hanes-Simon’s daughter in Southern California last July.

Hanes-Simon cried a little as she recalled the last conversation they had in person after the wedding.

“We hugged each other and she said, ‘Please come up and visit us.’ And I said, ‘We will, I promise.’ ”